Student data privacy would be protected by Colorado bill

A student privacy bill that passed unanimously from the Colorado House to the state Senate would force makers of educational software and apps to disclose what they're collecting, why and how they intend to destroy it. (Seth McConnell, The Denver Post)

A bill that passed unanimously from the Colorado House to the state Senate on Thursday would force makers of educational software and apps to disclose what they're collecting, why and how they intend to destroy it.

Molly Vogt and other advocates for the bill argue that
parents are worried about whether classroom details gleaned from technology paints an accurate picture of who their child is and who their child might grow up to be.

Bits of data as tiny as keystrokes could be reassembled through algorithms into a profile that follows someone from childhood to college, to background checks for jobs or possibly even insurance or credit ratings. Background checks these days dig deep and could dig deeper in the future, Vogt said.

House Bill 1423 would also block tech companies from keeping or assembling data that make a child personally identifiable said Vogt, a metro-area talk radio personality and public policy advocate.

"If this bill is going to put an extra layer of protection in place for our children to make sure the information that's being collected is what is necessary ... to ensure they get a quality education, then that's what we want to make sure we're doing," Vogt said. "But let's give parents a chance and a choice to protect their kids."

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Parents and the bill's sponsors, Democratic Rep. Alec Garnett of Denver and Republican Rep. Paul Lundeen of Monument, say disclosure is imperative, and there's very little of that now.

"As parents you will finally have information about what personally identifiable information is being collected on your child in the classroom, and why," Garnett said.

Open school door

Open doors on children's privacy is a bigger potential threat than most parents could imagine, experts say.

"Parents for the most part have no idea or remain largely unaware about how much data is collected about their children, with whom it is shared, if it's shared at all, where it is stored and how long it is stored and why it was even collected in the first place," said Denise Maes, the public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.

"But daily, sensitive information is collected and potentially outsourced to third parties with no guardrails."

Last year, state and county leaders across the country adopted 20 student data-privacy laws and 24 others in 2014.

The Software and Information Industry Association helped draft what it called workable solutions in 35 states "to strike a balance between technology and the appropriate use of data in the classroom," said Brendan Desetti, the trade association's director of education policy.

Desetti said the bill has some potential unintended consequences, including that it doesn't take into account information that individual school districts wish to collect and retain.

"Service providers don't often create state-tailored products, so peculiarities in law could cause students to lose out on innovative tools when restrictions and requirements affect product deployment in a particular region," he said.

Destroy versus delete

Under current practice, the word delete means only "sever the address," Lundeen said. Colorado's bill would switch to the more-aggressive "destroy."

Lundeen said he
thinks the Colorado bill does a good job of finding a middle ground, but doing nothing is not acceptable to him.

"We want to be known as the person we represent ourselves to be — the sum of our statements and actions, a living representation of our beliefs," he said. "But if someone collects data over time, every unedited thought, each partially considered action or any immature outburst, they would be able to string together, through the power of data analytics, a picture that might misrepresent who we actually are."

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